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American fathers love EVs, support clean energy, and are trying to eat more plants.
Picture a stereotypical American father.
He’s tending to his grill on a hot summer day, grinning as he flips a burger, stabs at a hot dog sizzling on the rack. He’s a bit doughy from decades of drinking beer (he’s a Coors man, like his dad) and of sitting at a desk, comfortably trapped in middle management. He tells a joke, and you feign a laugh, realizing that it probably seemed funnier, and more acceptable, to him back when he was young. He’d voted for Obama in 2008 — simpler times, he shrugs — but now leans conservative. It’s 10 degrees warmer in his mosquito-filled backyard than it should be at this time of year, but he doesn’t want to hear about climate change. In fact, he rolls his eyes when he mentions the couple down the street — the ones with the Ioniq and the panels on their roof.
This cartoon of an American dad who scoffs about climate change is easy to conjure, abetted by a Republican campaign to make environmentalism seem the province of liberal elites. “People when they start talking about things like global warming,” Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida and likely presidential candidate, said in December, “they typically use that as a pretext to do a bunch of left-wing things.” Things, of course, that would be anathema to such Coors-drinking, meat-stabbing Weber dads.
Yet the results of the inaugural Heatmap Climate Poll, conducted in late February by Benenson Strategy Group, contradict such facile assumptions. Although recent surveys have shown that men across all ideological lines are less concerned about climate change than women, having children seems to sharpen their focus. I spoke with Peter Olivier, the head of new markets for the carbon-removal company UNDO — and a self-proclaimed “climate dad” — about the phenomenon. “You have a young kid, you look at them, you think, oh my God, this kid’s gonna grow up and ask me what I did [about climate change] or what I didn’t do,” he said. “And I’m going to have to answer them.”
On a number of critical issues, those answers may indeed be coming from America’s dads. From EV adoption to beef consumption, fathers are helping lead the country towards a more sustainable future — or a least they say they are. Their answers were so strikingly climate-friendly that one wonders if they were trying to make the moms, and everybody else, look bad in comparison. (Knowing dads, it wouldn't be the first time.)
When it comes to vehicles, America’s fathers are on the forefront of decarbonization. Twenty-one percent of dads say they currently drive an electric vehicle, and 48% would like to in the future; those numbers dip to 12% and 43% for all men, 8% and 44% for moms, and to 8% and 39% for all respondents. They’re also more likely to say they currently or would like to ride an e-bike, ride a regular bicycle, or take public transportation. Everyone was about equally likely to say they currently walk instead of drive, but dads were more eager to do it in the future.
As to their homes, the trends were similar, albeit in a somewhat baffling way. Twenty-six percent of fathers, compared with 22% of all men, 17% of mothers, and 19% of all respondents, say they use heat pumps to warm and cool their houses. Thirty-seven percent of dads hope to switch to heat pumps in the future, 14 points higher than all men. Twenty-six percent of fathers say they currently power their homes with solar panels — compared to 19% of all men, 13% of all respondents, and, bizarrely, just 8% of moms — and compost at greater rates than the other demographics. Dads were also more willing than the other demographics to say they’d be willing to downsize their home.
While some of these results could be influenced by economic factors — it’s not cheap to install solar panels or buy an electric car, and there is a wide gender gap in American pay — the same cannot be said for the matter of diet. Sixteen percent of fathers say they currently do not eat meat (compared to 10% of all men, 8% of mothers, and 10% of all respondents), and 29% of dads want to do so in the future (that number drops by about 10 percentage points for the other demographics).
While fathers lag mothers and all respondents in currently limiting their beef intake, 34% of dads want to eat less red meat in the future — compared to 23% of all men, 17% of moms, and 21% of all respondents. Fathers were also more likely than all men, mothers and all respondents to say they limit their consumption of all animal products, by a slim margin in the present (25% to 21%, 23%, and 21%) and a wider one in the future (33% to 23%, 26%, and 22%).
And when it comes to cooking that meat — or its plant protein-based facsimile — 29% of dads would like to use an electric stove instead of gas, compared to 25% of all men, 18% of moms, and 20% of all respondents; the four groups currently eschew gas in roughly equal numbers.
Fathers were also far more supportive of wind, nuclear, and geothermal energy than the other demographics (though the four groups were broadly in favor of solar panels). Eighty-one percent of fathers said they’d welcome wind turbines in their communities, compared to 70% of all men, 72% of all respondents, and 73% of mothers. Forty-six percent of dads would be similarly welcoming to nuclear power; that number dropped to 42% of all men, 32% of all respondents, and just 16% of moms. A whopping 83% of fathers would also welcome a geothermal station, far more than the 59% of all men, 62% of all respondents, and 47% of moms who said the same.
Fathers were also about twice as likely as the other demographics to say that renewable energy should be rolled out as quickly as possible, even if comes at the expense of natural land. They were also more likely than the other groups to be supportive of spraying chemicals in the atmosphere to counter the effects of climate change.
Some results did track more closely to what one might expect from American fathers — compared to mothers, they worry less about the effects of climate change on their homes (71% to 85%), their children (67% to 82%), and their own lives (59% to 80%). Elon Musk has made dads more, not less, likely to want to drive a Tesla, and they want to have fewer, or no, children in the future — ostensibly to combat climate change, but possibly also to be able to go fishing more often with their friends.
Despite the latter results, the broader picture makes it clear that American fathers are more engaged with battling climate change than the stereotype allows. “Dads are funny and strange and less ideological and pedantic and all these regular dad things too,” says Olivier. “And they don’t stop being that way when they get focused on climate. So they do funny stuff like talk obsessively about heat pumps and try to calculate their solar gains … just all kind of normal dad stuff.” In other words, fathers are beginning to shift their essential dad-ness to the crisis at hand, in their lovably corny way.
So the next time you’re in that sweltering, mosquito-filled backyard, take a good look at what that fictional father is cooking on his grill — those might just be Impossible Burgers he’s tending to.
The Heatmap Climate Poll of 1,000 American adults was conducted by Benenson Strategy Group via online panels from Feb. 15 to 20, 2023. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.02 percentage points. You can read more about the results here.
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On the budget debate, MethaneSAT’s untimely demise, and Nvidia
Current conditions: The northwestern U.S. faces “above average significant wildfire potential” for July • A month’s worth of rain fell over just 12 hours in China’s Hubei province, forcing evacuations • The top floor of the Eiffel Tower is closed today due to extreme heat.
The Senate finally passed its version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act Tuesday morning, sending the tax package back to the House in hopes of delivering it to Trump by the July 4 holiday. The excise tax on renewables that had been stuffed into the bill over the weekend was removed after Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska struck a deal with the Senate leadership designed to secure her vote. In her piece examining exactly what’s in the bill, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo explains that even without the excise tax, the bill would “gum up the works for clean energy projects across the spectrum due to new phase-out schedules for tax credits and fast-approaching deadlines to meet complex foreign sourcing rules.” Debate on the legislation begins on the House floor today. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he doesn’t like the legislation, and a handful of other Republicans have already signaled they won’t vote for it.
The Environmental Protection Agency this week sent the White House a proposal that is expected to severely weaken the federal government’s ability to rein in planet-warming pollution. Details of the proposal, titled “Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and Motor Vehicle Reconsideration,” aren’t clear yet, but EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has reportedly been urging the Trump administration to repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which explicitly identified greenhouse gases as a public health threat and gave the EPA the authority to regulate them. Striking down that finding would “free EPA from the legal obligation to regulate climate pollution from most sources, including power plants, cars and trucks, and virtually any other source,” wrote Alex Guillén at Politico. The title of the proposal suggests it aims to roll back EPA tailpipe emissions standards, as well.
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So long, MethaneSAT, we hardly knew ye. The Environmental Defense Fund said Tuesday that it had lost contact with its $88 million methane-detecting satellite, and that the spacecraft was “likely not recoverable.” The team is still trying to figure out exactly what happened. MethaneSAT launched into orbit last March and was collecting data about methane pollution from global fossil fuel infrastructure. “Thanks to MethaneSAT, we have gained critical insight about the distribution and volume of methane being released from oil and gas production areas,” EDF said. “We have also developed an unprecedented capability to interpret the measurements from space and translate them into volumes of methane released. This capacity will be valuable to other missions.“ The good news is that MethaneSAT was far from the only methane-tracking satellite in orbit.
Nvidia is backing a D.C.-based startup called Emerald AI that “enables AI data centers to flexibly adjust their power consumption from the electricity grid on demand.” Its goal is to make the grid more reliable while still meeting the growing energy demands of AI computing. The startup emerged from stealth this week with a $24.5 million seed round led by Radical Ventures and including funding from Nvidia. Emerald AI’s platform “acts as a smart mediator between the grid and a data center,” Nvidia explains. A field test of the software during a grid stress event in Phoenix, Arizona, demonstrated a 25% reduction in the energy consumption of AI workloads over three hours. “Renewable energy, which is intermittent and variable, is easier to add to a grid if that grid has lots of shock absorbers that can shift with changes in power supply,” said Ayse Coskun, Emerald AI’s chief scientist and a professor at Boston University. “Data centers can become some of those shock absorbers.”
In case you missed it: California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday rolled back the state’s landmark Environmental Quality Act. The law, which had been in place since 1970, required environmental reviews for construction projects and had become a target for those looking to alleviate the state’s housing crisis. The change “means most urban developers will no longer have to study, predict, and mitigate the ways that new housing might affect local traffic, air pollution, flora and fauna, noise levels, groundwater quality, and objects of historic or archeological significance,” explainedCal Matters. On the other hand, it could also mean that much-needed housing projects get approved more quickly.
Tesla is expected to report its Q2 deliveries today, and analysts are projecting a year-over-year drop somewhere from 11% to 13%.
Jesse teaches Rob the basics of energy, power, and what it all has to do with the grid.
What is the difference between energy and power? How does the power grid work? And what’s the difference between a megawatt and a megawatt-hour?
On this week’s episode, we answer those questions and many, many more. This is the start of a new series: Shift Key Summer School. It’s a series of introductory “lecture conversations” meant to cover the basics of energy and the power grid for listeners of every experience level and background. In less than an hour, we try to get you up to speed on how to think about energy, power, horsepower, volts, amps, and what uses (approximately) 1 watt-hour, 1 kilowatt-hour, 1 megawatt-hour, and 1 gigawatt-hour.
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: Let’s start with the joule. The joule is the SI unit for both work and energy. And the basic definition of energy is the ability to do work — not work in a job, but like work in the physics sense, meaning we are moving or displacing an object around. So a joule is defined as 1 newton-meter, among other things. It has an electrical equivalent, too. A newton is a unit of force, and force is accelerating a mass, from basic physics, over some distance in this case. So 1 meter of distance.
So we can break that down further, right? And we can describe the newton as 1 kilogram accelerated at 1 meter per second, squared. And then the work part is over a distance of one meter. So that kind of gives us a sense of something you feel. A kilogram, right, that’s 2.2 pounds. I don’t know, it’s like … I’m trying to think of something in my life that weighs a kilogram. Rob, can you think of something? A couple pounds of food, I guess. A liter of water weighs a kilogram by definition, as well. So if you’ve got like a liter bottle of soda, there’s your kilogram.
Then I want to move it over a meter. So I have a distance I’m displacing it. And then the question is, how fast do I want to do that? How quickly do I want to accelerate that movement? And that’s the acceleration part. And so from there, you kind of get a physical sense of this. If something requires more energy, if I’m moving more mass around, or if I’m moving that mass over a longer distance — 1 meter versus 100 meters versus a kilometer, right? — or if I want to accelerate that mass faster over that distance, so zero to 60 in three seconds versus zero to 60 in 10 seconds in your car, that’s going to take more energy.
Robinson Meyer: I am looking up what weighs … Oh, here we go: A 13-inch MacBook Air weighs about, a little more than a kilogram.
Jenkins: So your laptop. If you want to throw your laptop over a meter, accelerating at a pace of 1 meter per second, squared …
Meyer: That’s about a joule.
Jenkins: … that’s about a joule.
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The Yale Center for Business and the Environment’s online clean energy programs equip you with tangible skills and powerful networks—and you can continue working while learning. In just five hours a week, propel your career and make a difference.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
If the Senate reconciliation bill gets enacted as written, you’ve got about 92 days left to seal the deal.
If you were thinking about buying or leasing an electric vehicle at some point, you should probably get on it like, right now. Because while it is not guaranteed that the House will approve the budget reconciliation bill that cleared the Senate Tuesday, it is highly likely. Assuming the bill as it’s currently written becomes law, EV tax credits will be gone as of October 1.
The Senate bill guts the subsidies for consumer purchases of electric vehicles, a longstanding goal of the Trump administration. Specifically, it would scrap the 30D tax credit by September 30 of this year, a harsher cut-off than the version of the bill that passed the House, which would have axed the credit by the end of 2025 except for automakers that had sold fewer than 200,000 electric vehicles. The credit as it exists now is worth up to $7,500 for cars with an MSRP below $55,000 (and trucks and sports utility vehicles under $80,000), and, under the Inflation Reduction Act, would have lasted through the end of 2032. The Senate bill also axes the $4,000 used EV tax credit at the end of September.
“Long story short, the credits under the current legislation are only going to be on the books through the end of September,” Corey Cantor, the research director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, told me. “Now is definitely a good time, if you’re interested in an EV, to look at the market.”
The Senate applied the same strict timeline to credits for clean commercial vehicles, both new and used. For home EV chargers, the tax credit will now expire at the end of June next year.
While EVs were on the road well before the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, what the new tax credit did was help build out a truly domestic electric vehicle market, Cantor said. “You have a bunch of refreshed EV models from major automakers,” Cantor told me, including “more affordable models in different segments, and many of them qualify for the credit.”
These include cars produceddomestically by Kia,Hyundai, and Chevrolet. But of course, the biggest winner from the credit is Tesla, whose Model Y was the best-selling car in the world in 2023.
Tesla shares were down over 5.5% in Tuesday afternoon trading, though not just because of Congress. JPMorgan also released an analyst report Monday arguing that the decline in sales seen in the first quarter would accelerate in the second quarter. President Trump, with whom Tesla CEO Elon Musk had an extremely public falling out last month, suggested on social media Monday night that the government efficiency department Musk himself formerly led should “take a good, hard, look” at the subsidies Musk receives across his many businesses. Trump also said that he would “take a look” at Musk’s United States citizenship in response to reporters’ questions about it.
Cantor told me that he expects a surge of consumer attention to the EV market if the bill passes in its current form. “You’ve seen more customers pull their purchase ahead” when subsidies cut-offs are imminent, he said.
But overall, the end of the subsidy is likely to reduce EV sales from their previously expected levels.
Harvard researchers have estimated that the termination of the EV tax credit “would cut the EV share of new vehicle sales in 2030 by 6.0 percentage points,” from 48% of new sales by 2030 to 42%. Combined with other Trump initiatives such as terminating the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program for publicly funded chargers (currently being litigated) and eliminating California’s waiver under the Clean Air Act that allowed it to set tighter vehicle emissions standards, the share of new car sales that are electric could fall to 32% in 2030.
But not all government support for electric vehicles will end by October 1, even if the bill gets the president’s signature in its current form.
“It’s important for consumers to know there are many states that offer subsidies, such as New York, and Colorado,” Cantor told me. That also goes for California, New Jersey, Nevada, and New Mexico. You can find the full list here.
Editor’s note: This story has been edited to include a higher cost limit for trucks and SUVs.